Geraldo Rivera: ‘Hip hop has done more damage to young African-Americans than racism in recent years’

On Monday’s "The Five," Geraldo Rivera said, "Hip hop has done more damage to young African-Americans than racism in recent years." (Fox News)

Fox News' Geraldo Rivera is giving hip hop a bad rap.

The pundit unleashed a freestyle diatribe against the music genre on Monday's telecast of "The Five" over Kendrick Lamar's performance on top of a vandalized police car during the BET Awards the previous evening.

Advertisement

"(That performance is) not helpful at all," Rivera seethed. "This is why I say hip hop has done more damage to young African-Americans than racism in recent years."

The assertion may be a controversial one coming less than two weeks after the massacre at the Emanuel AME Church by a racist white gunman that left nine dead. But Rivera was quick to differentiate the June 17 murderous rampage from the recent rash of police involved deaths of African-American males, including Baltimore's Freddie Gray.

"This is exactly the wrong message and then to conflate what happened in the church in Charleston, S.C., with these tragic incidents involving excessive use of force by cops... to equate that racist killer with these cops, it's so wrong," he said.

The entire panel of "The Five" unanimously panned Lamar's set, which included the lyric, "We hate po-po, wanna kill us on the street fo' sho," though Rivera never revealed by what metric hip hop has done so much "damage" to black communities.

"It's so counterproductive, it gives exactly the wrong message," he said.